Down on Chorlton Green with the Penny Savings Bank

I like the way stories have a habit of coming around all over again.

And so it is with the Penny Savings Bank.  It was set up in 1887 and according to the bank “any sum may be deposited between One Penny and £50. When the account reached £1 it is transferred to the Manchester and Salford Savings Bank. “

Our branch met every Saturday between 6 and 7 in the old school on the green.

And in placing the Penny Savings Bank on the green “the Trustees and managers” were clear in their own minds that perhaps this area was more likely “to see a large increase in the number of depositors, and cottager’s domestic servants, and parents on behalf of their children.”

After all this was the old centre of Chorlton and still retained something of its rural character including those of meaner means.

All of which was in direct contrast to the new village or New Chorlton which was centred on what we now call the Four Banks but which many will still remember as “Kemps Corner.”

This area grew quickly in the years after 1880 and catered for the new middling people who were moving into Chorlton attracted by its pleasant surroundings but also by the quick rail connection into the heart of the city and later by the extension of the Corporation tram network.

So swift and complete was the development of the area that its old name of Martledge was lost and forgotten in a generation.

And it led to that division of Chorlton in to the “old village” and the new, a division which was still there in the minds of many who were born here.

My old friend Marjorie who had been born in the old village and lived on Provis Road remained a little aloof at that “other bit” which she maintained was all “fancy cakes and silk knickers.”

Now that might have been a tad unfair but from the 1880s that was where the money was in the form of the professional, managerial and clerical classes.

And in turn that was where the banks were leaving us at the other end down by the Green with a post office and a Penny Savings Bank which with the passage of time has now left us with neither.

So I am drawn to both Marjorie’s memories of attending the bank in the 1940s and also by Sandra’s advert she sent me of the Penny Savings Bank dated 1934.

Marjorie remembered depositing money there along with her sister and it was a story I had let slide to the back of my memory.

But Sandra’s ad brought it all back along with that division of the two parts of Chorlton.

Today of course that distinction has pretty much receded in to the past along with Kemp’s Corner and the old school on the green.

And it was yesterday’s story of the conversion of the school and a painting by Peter Topping that prompted Sandra to show me the advert and set off today’s memories

Picture; advert for the Penny Savings Bank, 1934, from the collection of Sandra Hapgood, a Post Office Savings Tin circa 1940, courtesy of David Harrop

Painting; The school on Chorlton Green, © 2012 Peter Topping
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Facebook: Paintings from Pictures https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 6 ........... winter in 294

This is the continuing story  of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

Now I can’t remember which wintry scene this will have been but I am guessing it will be in the 1970s and because I don’t remember it being taken it might be after 1973.

I did  trawl through the “Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office”** for evidence of snow in London which offered up the news that it had snowed on Christmas day 1970.

But there are a lot of years on either side of 1970 so I shall just leave it.

Instead the picture took me back to living in the house before dad put in central heating.

It was a cold house, that is to say while the gas fire in the back room and the oil stove in the front kept the downstairs warm there was no heating upstairs.

Not that I guess that was any different from many homes at the time and like countless generations before me, going to bed was a quick affair of stripping off and jumping under the covers followed by that frantic effort to heat the bed up by  thrashing around.

Now Dad did go round with hot water bottles but sometimes I missed out and was doomed to the fate of cold bedclothes.

And all the hot water bottles would not prevent the slow but inevitable spread of ice on the inside of the windows which in the really cold winters rarely seemed to budge during the day.

Of course back then that was what you came to expect and pretty much took it for granted.

A few decades earlier and the occupants of our house might just have lit coal fires in the upstairs rooms in the most severe of winters but by the time we moved in the hapless DIYers had taken them out or blocked them up a move which today seems the height of vandalism but back in the 1950s and 60s was the “cool thing” to do.

I doubt that dad would have had truck with the ideas that bedroom fires should only be lit when someone was ill, keeping warm was for him always very important.

So in the fullness of time we got central heating by which time I had gone, moving from one very cold student bed sit to another in the more shabby parts of Manchester where icy windows were but one of the problems.

Of course back then it was all an adventure and which pushed 294 well into the background and it has taken this picture to bring it all back.

It was taken from the small back bedroom which was where dad decided to locate the boiler and which gave a magnificent view of the woods.

But that is for another time.

Pictures; looking out to the woods, circa 1970, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Location;Well Hall, Eltham, London

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall   

**“Monthly Weather Report of the Metrological Office”http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/5/3/Dec1970.pdf

A little bit about Samuel L Coulthurst and those amazing pictures of Manchester street life

Rochdale Road and Swan Street 1900

This is another of those images of Manchester street life by Samuel Lawrence Coulthurst.

It was taken in 1900 at the corner of Rochdale Road and Swan Street.

Now at this point I would normally go off and look for a story behind the image but today I am more
interested in Mr Coulthurst.

There are 171 of his photographs in the digital collection of Manchester Libraries, covering everything from those street scenes to buildings and portraits and taken between 1890 and 1920.*

There is also a book of his pictures which sadly is out of print. **

For a long time Mr Coulthurst was just a name I saw in the credit to the photograph I was studying but as more of his images turned up I became interested in him.

He was born in Blackley, described himself variously as a “book buyer” and “stationary buyer" and lived in various parts of Manchester and Salford.   He married Annie Higson in June 1900 and he died in Helsby in 1939.

Samuel Lawrence Coulthurst, 1890

And despite a series of wonderful photographs of the twin cities, I have only been able to turn up a poor quality photograph of the man himself.

But I have high hopes that something better will turn up.

After all he appears to have been well known during the late 19th century, exhibiting at the Royal Photographic Society in 1897 and was a member of the Manchester Amateur Photographic Society which under took the first photographic survey of Manchester and Salford between 1892-1901.

In 1901 232 platinotype prints were handed to the Manchester and Salford Reference Libraries.

A third copy was retained by the Society but over the years a number have gone missing. The photographs are mounted on sheets of card, either singly or groups of 2 or 4 photographs per sheet. Manuscript details are written in ink beneath each image giving a brief description, a number and the photographer’s name. ***

Now there is a lot more I want to know about Mr Coulthurst and I have contacted both Manchester Amateur Photographic Society and the Friends of Salford Museum’s Association.

In the meantime I will leave you with this small piece of his personal life.

In the March of 1922 Samuel and Annie took a cruise to Lisbon, Madeira and the Canary Islands.  I would just love to see any photographs of that trip, but I fear they have been lost forever, which brings me back to those of the digital archive which I will be going back to over the next few months.

Pictures; Rochdale Road and Swan Street, Samuel L Coulthurst, 1900, m41073 and Samuel L Coulthurst, 1890,  m72750, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Manchester Local Image Collection, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php

**The Samuel L Coulthurst Photographs: Victorian Salford and Manchester, 1995, Friends of Salford Museum’s Association

***National Archives, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/A2A/records.aspx?cat=124-2373&cid=0#0

Lunch time on the green by the lych gate in 1910

We are sometime in the summer of 1910 and judging by the collection of young people I think it must be dinner time.

A few are young enough to be at school but four at least of the central group will have been working.

And I think they will have been on their lunch break from the laundry.  This was the Pasley later renamed the Queen and Pasley on Crescent Road.*

It opened in 1893, and at one point employed 50 staff. It was along with the brick works the closest we came to being industrial.

Inside the place which survived into the 1980s, all the washing machines were belt driven by a huge steam engine and the laundry was the first to install the “float-iron system” which consisted of the multiple roller pressing machines. This was 15 feet wide and 15 feet long and “was a mass production ironing machine, with delicately poised rollers. You could put a shirt with pearl buttons on it and it wouldn’t leave a mark.”**

So with the noise, steam, and general hubbub I guess posing for the camera outside the lych gate was a welcome diversion.

Now it is impossible to know who any of them were, but I rather think the young man standing with his arms folded might just be Arthur Higginbotham who would have been 15 and was the son of one of our local farmers.

The Higginbotham’s had been here since the 1840s and lived in the farmhouse almost opposite the church yard.

Someone very similar crops up in other pictures from the time riding a horse and while it is speculation it makes sense that this was Arthur rather than another employee of the Queen and Pasley, for I doubt they would have had a lad with a horse or likewise allowed their own horse to be ridden without a saddle through the village.

So on that hot summer’s day Arthur may have taken time out from the farm and strolled across to join the crowd.   I rather expect he knew all of the others there and like them enjoyed the novelty of having a photograph taken. Just how much of a novelty can be gauged in the mix of poses.

There at the centre are the confident ones staring back at the camera with arms folded and hands on hips.

And then there are those who peer back a little unsure of the pose to strike.  The boy with his hands in his pockets the girls with the basket one of whom is craning her neck to see what is going on.

But for me it is the two on the extreme left. One looks directly into the camera, but the other seems more interested in the work of the men down by the gates to the Bowling Green Hotel.

None of the workman gives the photographer any house room.  Whatever they are doing it is far more absorbing than the effort of posing for the camera.

And I suppose that is the point.  I said having your picture taken was still a novelty but that is a little inaccurate, because there would by 1910 have been regular commercial photographers wandering the township.

In some cases they specialized in taking pictures of the new rows of houses which were going up across Chorlton and would make a living from offering the images to the local householders who more often than not bought the card to send to friends and family.  You come across these with a cross drawn above a house or a comment on the back telling the reader, “This is our house.”

Other commercial photographers were more interested in the iconic scenes like the Horse and Jockey, country lanes or the Lych Gate.

And I suppose this is how our picture came together. On that hot summers day with some good light to play with the photographer had set up on the green, and as happens in minutes he has drawn a crowd. I say he because I am fairly confident that this was still a time when most travelling photographers were men.

And given that it was midday most of his audience were children or young people on their lunch break.

You can get some sense of just how impromptu the whole thing is from what looks like a cricket bat on the ground beside Arthur.

I guess the two boys were in the middle of a game, while the two young girls caught with their basket were either on an errand or carrying their lunch.

It is a wonderful picture and one that is worth far more study.  There are the buildings of the old Bowling Green and the barn of the farm to the left of the church and just poking up over the wall of the graveyard the monument with its apparently broken pillar.  All of which is for another time.

*renamed Crossland Road
**memories from the owner of the laundry March 1985

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Walking the Thames

Now I am the first to admit it’s a bit of a silly title but that is exactly what my friend Neil did, once under the river at Woolwich and then again at Greenwich.

It’s not my chosen way of leaving Woolwich for that other place, but Neil had never seen either of the foot tunnels and so it was an adventure.

I have to say that these are adventures I no longer want to do.

I prefer the ferry where I can see where I am going and know that the water is below me and not above me.

I still have vivid memories of that old illuminated sign at the Wapping and Rotherhithe  Underground Stations  announcing  “Men working on Pumps” when I used the Tube regularly in the 1960s to know that over is better than under, a feeling enhanced by one visit to Easington Colliery.

Kay’s father who was Chief Mechanical Engineer at the pit thought I would be interested in seeing how generations of the Baxter family had made their living.

There was no way I could say no to my future father in law, although a mile down and three miles out under the North Sea I wish I had done so.

I last walked the walk when I was ten and have never done the journey since.
I do remember it was exciting.

The floor slowly sloped down there was that echoing sound of your footsteps and the point where the other exist came into view.

So that is it.  I have thanked Neil for his pictures, which have made me a tad homesick but not enough to do that walk.

Location; London

Pictures, the foot tunnels, April 2017 from the collection of Neil Simpson

A story of that iconic bit of Chorlton from 1993

It is just thirty-three years since our lychgate was last restored and I missed the anniversary back in April so here courtesy of Andrew Robertson and his collection of newspaper clippings is the story.

It always surprises people that the gate only dates back to the Queen Victoria's Jubilee but that said it has acted as a local land marks since 1887, and according to popular memory contained a bell which was rung to mark the end of the old year and the coming of the new.

That said you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper.  The parish church closed in 1940 due to frost damage not 1930 and was demolished in 1949, while the gate was erected in 1887 not ten years later.

Still it is a nice piece of history and underlines the need to carefully collect those old newspaper accounts.

And in the next few weeks I shall be returning to this iconic image of Chorlton with some more stories, a new painting and tales of parish jealousies and disputes.

And as a postscript had a second make over in the winter of 2025.

Picture; courtesy of Andrew Robertson, South Manchester Reporter, April 1993

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 5 living through the Great War

Our house in 2014

The centenary of the Progress Estate has long passed.

Now we can lay claim to about thirty of those 100 years having moved in to 294 Well Hall Road in the middle of 1964 but I gave seldom thought to the history of the house or to the people who occupied it before us.

But now I am drawn to that past and have begun to explore something of what our home would have been like a century ago.*

And because I am deep into researching for a new book on the Great War the events of that year when the Arsenal workers and their families began new lives in Well Hall has special signifigance.

The popular story of how we coped during the four years tends to fasten on the participation of women on the shop floor and in the fields; the impact of Zeppelin raids and the blackout but all too often skips over the huge hike in the cost of living.

As Henry Hyndman the leading socialist pointed out “since the war had begun prices had gone up 22%, so that now the purchasing power of a sovereign was from 13s. 6d to 13s.9d.”**

And this was the context behind the industrial conflicts which rumbled on and which some at the time and since have sought to characterise as greedy workers exploiting a country at war.

The reality was very different as Sam Hague who spoke at a meeting in Manchester was quick to point out, “there never had been a time in the nation’s history when the working classes had so solidly backed the Government.”***

The aims of the committee, 1915

Working hours increased, and under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and The Munitions War Act 1915 workers were being prosecuted for absenteeism and striking over wages and conditions.

In Manchester the first prosecutions under the Munitions War Act were held at the Town Hall on Friday July 30 when thirty-two men employed at Craven Bros Ltd Reddish were brought before the Recorder charged with going on strike over wages and working conditions without first submitting the matter to the Board of Trade.

And in response to the rising cost of living the Labour movement set up local emergency war committees and food vigilance committees, which reported to the War Emergency Workers National Committee in London which had come into being on the day war broke out.

The idea of a food vigilance committee seems oddly old fashioned but back in 1915 it was seen by many as an essential way of preventing the  growing practice of adulterating food and the rise in the cost of living.

The London Food Vigilance Committee was a joint body made of the London Joint Committee of Co-operative Societies, the London Trades Council and the London Labour Party.

And cooperating with the Royal Arsenal Co-op in our part of London was Councillor William Barefoot of the Woolwich Labour Party.

These committees set out clear policies on how to manage shortages by insisting that “the Government purchase all essential imported food stuffs, commandeer or control all home grown food products and make effective use of ships and the control of transport facilities” thereby securing both a fair share of what was available and at a controlled price.”****

And a key part of this would be local authorities who should be “power to deal with the distribution of food stuffs and coal, and to establish Municipal Kitchens.”

There will be some who see in this a creeping form of state control but the reality was that war time legislation had already given the authorities sweeping powers but there was a woeful lack of action over the rise in rents, coal and food prices and the lowering of the quality of what was on offer to eat.

The Committees were fully aware that at some point rationing would have to be introduced and it followed therefore that the Co-op and Labour movements should be represented on official committees given that they "had an understanding of the food requirements of the workers.”

All of which brings me back to the Arsenal workers who were beginning to take up residence in their new homes and some of whom will have been actively involved in that committee.

Pictures; our house on Well Hall Road, 2014, courtesy of Chrissie Rose, extracts from documents from The London Food Vigilance Committee, 1915, courtesy of the Labour History Archives & Study Centre,  at the People’s History Museum, Manchester,http://www.phm.org.uk/

*One hundred years of one house in Well Hall,
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20100%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall   

**Manchester Guardian February 19 1915

*** Free Trade Hall, Manchester February 14, 1915

**** The London Food Vigilance Committee, 1915